A perception experiment involving 28 German listeners ispresented. It investigates – for sequences of request, pause,and affirmative answer – the effect of pause duration on theanswerer's perceived willingness to comply with the request.Replicating earlier results on American English, perceivedwillingness was found to decrease with increasing pauseduration, particularly above a "tolerance threshold" of 600 ms.Refining and qualifying this replicated result, the perceptionexperiment showed additional effects of speaking-rate contextand pause quality (silence vs. breathing vs. café noise) on perceivedwillingness judgments. The overall results picture isdiscussed with respect to the origin of the "tolerancethreshold", the status of breathing in speech, and the functionof pauses in communication.